Consumers are becoming more environmental conscious and are beginning to recycle bottles, cans and paper products in order to conserve energy and clean up the environment. Additionlly, many states have enacted legislation which requires deposits on carbonated beverages contained in bottles and cans to induce consumers of those products to recycle the containers after use. Both of these factors have renewed an interest in finding a relative simple device which make it easier, safer and more convenient for consumers to recycle metal containers, such as aluminium cans and the like.
One of the draw backs associated with recycling aluminium cans is that although they may be very light after they have dispensed their content, they still occupy their original volumn and thus large recycling devices, such as large plastic trash bags or boxes, are needed to conveniently transport the recyclable containers. Moreover, consumers usually collect bottles and cans over long periods of time (usually week or perhaps months) before returning them to a store or a redemption center.
aluminium cans and the like can be crushed by using conventional means such as a hammer, a rock or just stepping on and crushing the container. However, these crushing methods do not result in a uniformly crushed container and there is a good chance that the person using one of the above means may become injured, and the probability of injury increases if many metal containers are to be crushed.
The aluminium industry projects that in the near future many vegetable, fruit and other products will be packaged in an aluminium containers instead of tin cans, plastic or glass bottles. If and when this occurs, this will substantially increase the demand for a portable, manually operated metal container crushing device which is capable of crushing various shapes and sizes of aluminium containers.
There is presently available manual crushing devices such as U.S. Pat. Nos. 3,667,386, 3,988,978, 4,292,891, 4,383,480, 4,498,385, 5,532,861, 4,561,351, and 4,653,398, which are used in recycling metal containers. However, none of these references disclose a compact surface/lip means arrangement which captively engages only one end of the container to result in a relatively easy three step compaction of the container.
Wherefore, it is an object of the invention is to provide a container crushing device which is manually operated, light weight, portable and easily useable by a consumer.
Another object of the invention is to provide a metal container crushing device which requires a relatively small force to crush and compact a metal container into a flat product.
A still further object of the invention is to provide a unit which is relatively inexpensive to manufacture and maintain.